From ‘Goods’ to ‘Bads’? Revisiting the Political Economy of Risk

Abstract

German social theorist Ulrich Beck has consistently maintained that the logic of social distribution in western cultures has been reconfigured over the last three decades. Beck believes that, in the first industrial modernity, political and economic energies were directed toward the dissemination of ‘social goods’, such as healthcare, employment and wealth. By contrast, in the second modernity - or risk society - the positive logic of goods distribution is displaced by a negative logic of ‘social bads’, exemplified by environmental despoliation, terrorism and nuclear accidents. Critically, whilst the logic of goods is sectoral - some win and some lose, some are protected, some exposed - social bads follow a universalising logic which threatens rich and poor alike. This article interrogates and challenges these core claims by fusing together and developing empirical and theoretical criticisms of the theory of distributional logic. Empirically, it is demonstrated that Beck draws upon a narrow range of examples, is insensitive to continuities in social reproduction and glosses over the intensification of traditional inequalities. Theoretically, the paper asserts that the risk society perspective constructs an unsustainable divide between interconnected modes of distribution, neglects the way in which political discourses can be used to reinforce hegemonic interests and overlooks uneven patterns of risk distribution.